d achievements must have affected,
profoundly, the popular imagination, in order to invent stories to
illuminate fabricated names. The thing is quite impossible. A practice
which we can trace to the edge of that period whose historical character
may be proved to demonstration, we may conclude to have extended on
into the period immediately preceding that. When bards illuminated with
stories and marvellous circumstances the battle of Clontarf and the
battle of Moyrath, we may believe their predecessors to have done the
same for the earlier centuries. The absence of an imaginative literature
other than historical shows also that the literature must have followed,
regularly, the course of the history, and was not an archaeological
attempt to create an interest in names and events which were found
in the chronicles. It is, therefore, a reasonable conclusion that the
bardic literature, where it reveals a clear sequence in the order of
events, and where there is no antecedent improbability, supplies a
trustworthy guide to the general course of our history.

So far as the clear light of history reaches, so far may these tales be
proved to be historical. It is, therefore, reasonable to suppose that
the same consonance between them and the actual course of events which
subsisted during the period which lies in clear light, marked also that
other preceding period of which the light is no longer dry.

The earliest manuscript of these tales is the Leabhar [Note: Leabar na
Heera.] na Huidhre, a work of the eleventh century, so that we may
feel sure that we have them in a condition unimpaired by the revival of
learning, or any archaeological restoration or improvement. Now, of some
of these there have been preserved copies in other later MSS., which
differ very little from the copies preserved in the Leabhar na Huidhre,
from which we may conclude that these tales had arrived at a fixed
state, and a point at which it was considered wrong to interfere with
the text.

The feast of Bricrind is one of the tales preserved in this manuscript.
The author of the tale in its present form, whenever he lived, composed
it, having before him original books which he collated, using his
judgment at times upon the materials to his hand. At one stage he
observes that the books are at variance on a certain point, namely, that
at which Cuculain, Conal the Victorious, and Laery Buada go to the lake
of Uath in order to be judged by him. Some of the book